Worst Nations in Each Era

[Agema]

The best MR EA Atlantis has on its base troops is 10, and the deep Atlanteans are lower (7-8?). I can quite assure you from experience that a roughly equal gold cost of Ryleh mind blast things with a melee screen versus EA Atlantean troops of any type will tend to end in a big defeat for Atlantis. If you stick high HP thugs with good MR (+MR boosts by spell, bless or item pretty much required) they suck up a lot of the hits and help. If you can recruit enough Pillars, give them a massive S bless and use your god to cast Antimagic, that would get them high enough MR. But good luck getting enough of them.

[Zeldor]

Yeah, Pillars are a cool unit, but totally useless, even in CBM. No way to recruit enough of them [and for almost every nation bless negates productivity, too many points to waste]. I will have to poke QM about that.

[thejeff]

Isn't 10 average MR? It's the best many nations get on basic troops. Are they all helpless against R'lyeh? Kings & Mages can easily be boosted to draw some of the fire as well.

Having low mr troops available doesn't really matter. You just don't use them against R'lyeh. Save them for when you need cold & fire resistance.

I haven't used them against R'lyeh. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic.

Would Pillars be too strong if made non-capital? You still wouldn't be able to rely on them for early expansion. They'd only be available in the water and they're slow on land. It would be different to have a strong non-rush bless nation.

[Zeldor]

Living Pillar has 8! MR. It's elite unit for a nation that needs magic scale [so make it 7]. Elite unit with animal-level MR! Their non-sacred mages cost 250 gold for 6 RP. SCs are much much worse than Niefel giants, can't self-bless and cost as Niefels - 500 gold. H3 guys are 300 gold and cap only, so pretty much unusable. No N for free forts. Almost no S. No D. No B. No clams.

[Humakty]

One could add their mages have under average precision... Or is it only MA ?

[Agema]

No, I think Atlantis other eras have slightly subnormal precision too, but I don't think it's a big deal.

It's true that 10MR is basic. But Rlyeh just sits at the back of the battlemap and blasts away. Against 10MR, a unit hit by mind blast takes about 45% chance paralysis and about 45% chance 1AN damage (which is surprisingly painful). You don't have spells that have enough range to hit back, no flight, and no bowfire. Add to that, Atlanteans are medium to heavy infantry, which means fairly slow so they'll be a long time to close and take a lot of hits on the way. Oceania can at least cross the battlefield pretty quickly.

Pillars have 3 big problems: Massive resource cost (50+), massive encumbrance (10), and bad MR (8). Even with non-capital production, they would arrive very slowly - EA Atlantis' underwater forts have low admin, so pull in few resources from surrounding provinces. Okay, 10 encumbrance isn't completely as bad as it seems as they get 2 attacks, but with low numbers still need to do a lot of killing, and fatigue=criticals which will badly undermine their excellent armour. And why do they have a shield? They've only got 5 Def with it anyway, whilst it's encumbering them and adding to their res cost. It's not like that shield saves them from mind blast, or that any EA bows are going to do much against their massive armour if they get out of water.

Making them useful pretty much demands high E&S bless, and + production. You should be thinking about a minor N bless as well. Once you've spent all that, you've got virtually nothing left to afford stuff EA Atlantis also really needs, like money - lots of it. Oh, and you've got just about one pretender choice that isn't either W, D, or W&D, and it's the S1N1 monolith.

[Micah]

I actually tried to field pillars in one game when I was new to Dom, and I found out the hard way that Atlantis gets a 20-admin cap, which makes the pillars even more unusable. Plus what's up with them not having helmets?

Making them recruit-anywhere wouldn't be OP at all, but it would be incredibly unthematic given the description.

I'm not sure if Atlantis needs magic-3. They're pretty screwed in research regardless, and that's a lot of points to blow to be slightly less sucky, especially with the MR issue.

The Basalt kings should probably be compared to Dai Oni, not Jarls, due to much more similar pathing. Doing that makes it much easier to see how bad they are.

Basalt king pros: better natural prot (largely irrelevant with E magic though), no horrible starting armor (largely irrelevant in an SC context), CR instead of PR, amphibian, not a demon, no research malus (but Atlantis' non-cap mages are both horrible in general and overpriced), 1 point of str, one more hp (not QUITE as trivial as it sounds since it changes 10% regen from 5 to 6 points, although at 4 stars this evens out).

Not too much going for them, it seems.

Oni Pros: 2! less enc, 1 more magic path, better path distribution (E3 base is overkill with summon EP, and Dai Oni all have the critical F2 for phoenix pyre), can self bless!!!, 1 more MR, 2 more base attack, 6! more base defense (4 after the W magic), 4! more morale (What's up with a 14 morale on basalt kings?), mountain survival, 1 more precision, 2nd form (crappy, but better than nothing). Minor A access.

We'll call W versus D a wash (soul vortex versus cold resistance and quickness is a hard call to make in terms of SC potential)

Looks like Atlantis could use some love, for sure.

[Amorphous]

Originally Posted by Zeldor

Living Pillar has 8! MR. It's elite unit for a nation that needs magic scale [so make it 7]. Elite unit with animal-level MR! Their non-sacred mages cost 250 gold for 6 RP. SCs are much much worse than Niefel giants, can't self-bless and cost as Niefels - 500 gold. H3 guys are 300 gold and cap only, so pretty much unusable. No N for free forts. Almost no S. No D. No B. No clams.

Looking at it, the above seems unreasonable.

Living Pillars being elite units does not mean that they should be used for everything. Indeed, a situation where someone is spamming MR spells is exactly the situation where you do not want to use them. They are rather cost effective castle defenders and make for decent bodyguards in a pinch, but that is pretty much it.

You are also not being consequent. If Living Pillars are counted as MR 7 units, Mages of the Deep should be counted as 8 RP units.

Although Basalt Kings can be seen as inferior to Niefel Jarls, they are definitely not "much much worse" and, quite frankly, if you need to look at Niefel Jarls to find something more powerful, you are not exactly scraping at the bottom of the barrel.

In light of your comparison with Niefelheim it is also somewhat strange that you lambast their H3 priest for being unusable. I cannot say that I agree, but even apart from that, Niefelheim does not have any H3 and Atlantis has no less access to H2 and H1 than anyone.

So let us look at what EA Atlantis actually has when it comes to what is discussed here.

Speaking of research, their mages are expensive, but not particularly slow. And they have both the path and the gems for lanterns.

Apart from being rather decent SCs after a quite modest investment, Basalt Kings are also very good battle mages. Things like blade wind sort of speaks for itself in the early era, but the kings also have a broad range of troop buffing options and access to the very effective acid line of spells (combine for more fun when some opponent thinks that heavy infantry is good against the former).

The everywhere recruitable Mages of the Deep are no slouches on their own and their astral pick make them very good complements to the Basalt Kings. You do e.g. not need a god to cast antimagic, the mages can do that just fine when needed.

As for diversification into nature, that is easily accomplished. I happen to think that a modest investment in the nature path for the Atlantis god (I really recommend Dagon) is a good idea, but even discounting that, it is easy enough to find any of the numerous tribes with nature mages on land.

The thing about R'lyeh is also widely blown out of proportion in my opinion. I consider Atlantis a more powerful nation than R'lyeh in the early era overall. If we, for just a moment, discount the giboleth and gibodai, R'lyeh troops are just a speed bump for Atlantis. This is actually the case above water, which happens to be one of the major strengths of Atlantis - it is the only fully amphibious nation. R'lyeh needs its mind blasters to keep up. Without magic support, using deep ones aginst R'lyeh is not a particularly good idea - so use your ordinary MR 10 troops and better mobility - but as soon as antimagic or iron will enters the picture that changes.

Just looking at the raw numbers of antimagiced deep ones against giboleths is informative. The mind blasters have 10 shots and about 30% chance of going through MR which will paralyse the deep one for about 5 turns. At any given time a single giboleth is not likely to have paralysed more than two deep ones and you get 4 deep ones for the price of one giboleth. The real advantage of the paralysis is that it will help break the formation of the deep ones and make it easy for the R'lyeh infantry screen to kill them. However, the AI likes to target things with lots of hp. Atlantis can field a number of ordinary shamblers with MR 10 and with antimagic or iron will up, only about every 5th blast will go through. Add luck to make it every 10th hit if you can. These shamblers will draw a lot of the attention from the deep ones and let these wreak havoc on R'lyeh troops.

It is by no means a cake walk and to be safe you probably need to spend a bit more money on your army than R'lyeh, but that is mitigated by the fact that Atlantis does not need to spread its forces as thin. Being able to retreat to and attack from land is a great advantage.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Zeldor

Living Pillar has 8! MR.

Wow, 40,320 MR??? Awesome.

-Max

[Micah]

Amorphous - I think the comparison to Yomi is a better one than to Niefel. And Yomi isn't generally regarded as a superstar nation.

Apart from that you are giving way too much credit to the mage of the deep. They're pretty much irredeemably horrible. They're massively overpriced, can't cast antimagic like you say without some sort of boosting (cons-6 for skullcaps? Good luck with that. POTS? You're dead to a magic duel before you get to your 2nd round even on defense, plus antimagic requires a detour up enchantment research-wise, which has little else of much use to Atlantis) and are magic-duel fodder if you can somehow last long enough to even get to them, especially since you're having to spend 1000g to get a single point of astral on average. Their non-sacred status also means they're an upkeep sink with their insane pricetag. W2 as their base is also incredibly uninspiring.

The other major issue fighting rlyeh is that their mind blasters tend to get away fairly intact if they lose a battle, meaning they're around the next turn with a fresh screen of PD chaff to hide behind, whereas Atlantis' troops have to get up close and personal to do much of note, and thus take a large beating in every engagement even if they win.